


things you said while I was sleeping

by lulla_lunekjaer



Category: Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, takes place mid-rtd so spoilers leading up to that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-06
Updated: 2018-03-06
Packaged: 2019-03-27 06:27:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13875084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulla_lunekjaer/pseuds/lulla_lunekjaer
Summary: “Where’s Grey?” Jack said.“He’ll be down later,” Laney told him, but he must have visited while Jack was asleep, because he didn’t see him.-REMEMBER THE DUST, E. Jade LomaxGrey (eventually) does.





	things you said while I was sleeping

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, this took forever to write. Half of it was me checking details in one of the books and getting sucked in, though. 
> 
> This takes place during RTD when everyone's finally back in Rivertown and Jack's recovering from being cursed and losing his leg. 
> 
> I felt so many feelings about everyone while working on this, as Adrian no doubt knows, because I texted him about them. 
> 
> Also, I got to the part about the french fries (which are not French but just fries because how can they be French when there is no France and yet??? I spent a lot of time thinking about this) around noon before I ate lunch and started lusting after fries from Five Guys and went downstairs only to find my mother had made me a salad (which, while a decent salad, did not sate my longing for french fries)

Grey didn’t know why he wouldn’t go downstairs. He justified it to himself by saying that he had to watch Sandry, that she was dangerous, that she needed protection. He was looking through Rupert’s papers, helping decode. He was asleep whenever Laney or Rupert stumbled back upstairs after sitting with Jack; he was pretending. 

He really was asleep the first time Jack woke up. Keeping a curse from spreading is not the most relaxing of pastimes, nor is arguing with an irate Sez on the virtues of keeping someone alive versus killing her on the spot, especially when that person is your sister. Grey had slept for eleven hours, been up for three and had some food forced into him by Miz Eliza, and then returned to bed for another seven. Somewhere in there, Rupert reported, Jack had woken up, and appeared to be fully in possession of his senses, but not his leg. 

Grey was reading a book in a corner and trying his hardest to be invisible when Wren came up.

“You can go sit with him, you know,” she said, with a look that told him she still didn’t trust him, that it might always be that way, and that it was because of Sandry, but that she pitied him. 

“Maybe later,” Grey said. “I wouldn’t want to intrude on him and Laney.” Wren gave a start, which meant she grasped his meaning. He felt bad for insinuating things, especially when they were in no way true, but Wren left him alone after that. He went back to  _ A Treatise on the Effects of Binding Spells and Their Consequences.  _

Laney came up almost an hour after sunset, carrying a tray with the remains of the food she had badgered into him. She looked straight at him, at the way he was holding himself, tight and hunched over, at the way his eyes didn’t quite focus on her, at the way his hands were gripped his book, tense and still, and she went into the kitchen. 

Jack had had bread and soup foisted upon him, but Laney brought fries back to Grey’s corner table. There was a little pot of the glutinous fish sauce on the tray as well, the one that Jack liked, and a glass of milk. Grey slowly looked up from his book to meet Laney’s eyes.  

“Eat,” she said, in that way that made her seem like a queen commanding her troops on a battlefield. 

Grey complied, picking up first singular fries and eating them, then in pairs, and then whole handfuls, as if he had only just then realized how hungry he was. He didn’t touch the sauce.

Laney fiddled with her bracelets as she watched him eat. She only ever admitted it to Jack, but Laney Jones was tired. Those last few days - last few weeks, months, ever since Rupert disappeared, really - had wearied her down to the bone and to the soul. There would be no rest for her, for any of them, she knew, not for a long while yet.

Grey finished eating. He took a long drink from the milk, then wiped his mouth. 

Laney rested her chin on her hands, elbows on the table. Grey didn’t notice, but they had been shaking. 

“Miss Jones,” Grey said. She knew what he meant. 

“He asked about you, pipsqueak,” Laney said. “I told him you’d be down later.”

Grey didn’t respond. Laney got up and cleared the table of both the tray, which she passed back to someone in the kitchen, and the small stack of books Grey had been making his way through. Those went to the (much larger) pile of books, boxes, papers, notes, and ciphers next to the table that Rupert and Gloria and their cadre of sage-like individuals had commandeered for their memory field research. In this case, “commandeered” meant “had been told to stick all their stuff next to by Sally-Anne and had the term “commandeered” applied to after the fact by Sez, among others.” 

Grey made a small noise at having his books taken away, but didn’t stop Laney, and she didn’t take the one he had clutched in his arms. 

“One of the hedgewitches is on infirmary duty until dawn,” Laney said, looking back at Grey as she headed up the stairs. “Try to get some sleep, pip.” 

Grey watched her go before sighing and letting his head thump on the table. 

He sat like that for a long while, as the last fish shop customers left for home, as some hedgewitches headed out to get some sleep before returning the next day, as Sally-Anne herself was finally satisfied with the state of the kitchen and allowed herself to be dragged upstairs by Sez. 

The moon rose, coming in through the windows of the fish shop and leaving lines of dusty white light across the floor. Grey crept downstairs, passing the hedgewitch on duty without looking at her. He could feel her eyes on him, but she didn’t stop him and she didn’t say anything. 

It was easy to find Jack’s bed, even in the near-dark of the fish shop basement, lit only by candles here and there in sconces, left over from the days before electricity had been put in. The light they provided was enough to see by, but soft enough to allow the patients to easily sleep. Only one of them had red hair. 

Grey had been told that Rue had had to take his leg - “Better than his life,” she sniffed, when Sez had sat them all down to discuss their next plans. He still wasn’t expecting the sudden lack of anything beneath Jack’s knee. 

He stood there next to the bed, book clutched to his chest, and looked down at the sleeping Giantkiller. Grey had seen him asleep before - they were roommates, after all, and they had travelled through the mountains together, and then back to St. John’s Port, and it was sometimes hard to remember that that had been their lives only a few days ago. Was it a week now? Grey had lost track of time, trying to keep awake in the back and then the front of the truck. Grey had seen him asleep before, but not like this, not unnaturally. Not even when he was cursed the first time and it was Grey’s curse and Grey’s fault and Sandry - Sandry was far away then, but now Sandry was here, and it was all his fault. 

Jack was so still, his skin flushed as he sweated out the remains of the curse. He had been twelve, and Sandry had asked, had wanted to see what he could do. He was so proud when he showed it to her, and she had smiled kindly and asked for a copy, like she was going to hang it up on the wall. He didn’t know what she had done with it until Jack was hit at the Academy. 

It had scared him then, and it scared him now. What he could do. He had learned so much at the Academy, and the Library, and from all his books. He could write an even better curse now, make it more deadly, more devastating, harder to break, harder to destroy. He could put it in the water supply, or the air, or load it into a bullet. The Elsewhere pressed on him, as thin as a sieve, magic dripping through, begging to be used. 

Grey sat down and leaned on the bit of Jack’s cot that should be occupied by a leg. Then again, if it had been occupied by a leg, there would be no reason for Jack to be in the cot. He let out a breath, moving his book to his lap and pillowing his head on his arms. 

Jack made a small noise, and Grey turned his head to face him.

“I meant what I said, you know, Farris.” Jack didn’t move. “It’s not okay. You can’t just keep on taking blows like this.” 

It reminded him too much of Sandry. She had been his protector when no one else was. She had taken his father’s abuse and neglect and the vigilantes’ strikes and even the Giantkiller himself to keep him safe, to get him out. Had his father even noticed when he had disappeared? Jack had, right away, when he didn’t come back from the book sale, when they had locked him up with an Elsewhere crack around his neck and dumped his unconscious friends at his feet. They had all been lucky that time, or maybe Lucky.

Grey sighed again. He was beginning to feel like Rupert. 

“I thought this might be it. That it might be the end. In the truck all the way here, I just kept thinking about how if you died it would be my fault. I wrote the curse, I was supposed to stop it, to contain it until we got to Rue.” How many other people had been killed by that gun, who didn’t know hags? How many people were dead by his curse? How many times had the Bureau mutated and bred it, this thing of beauty and suffering that he had created? The sickness in Haymaker’s District in St. John’s Port, the gun, the diagrams he had left at home in the mountains, the ones the Bureau had probably seized along with everything else in his father’s house. Grey no longer remembered sitting in a bakery in the mountains and talking about the logistics of it with George the Dragon Slayer, about the Rykes transform for rhythmic syncing and grounded Hansen stitching. Overflow channels, she had said. subsidiaries of the diminishment function, he had offered back. She, at least had thought it was beautiful. He couldn’t remember who had said it to him, but he still remembered how he had felt when she did. 

“I let go.” The irony of it hadn’t escaped him. He let go of Jack to defend Sandry. One protector for another for another. “I let go, Jack. Maybe if I hadn’t, things would be different. 

“Heh,” he said, “If you were awake you’d tell me not to be stupid. That I did the best I could. You forget that I know you, Jack, and if it were me you never would have let go. Well, that’s a moot point, you don’t have magic, but you would have figured something out, and you know what I mean. You usually do. Not on magic, or physics, or theoretical anything, really . . .”

Grey picked at a loose thread in the blanket. 

“You know what I mean.” 

He yawned, suddenly aware of how long it had been since the last time he had slept. 

“I just keep thinking that someday you’re going to die and it’ll be my fault and I don’t know if I’ll be able to live with that. Honestly, given our shared trauma, it’s surprising any of us can live with it. You were my nightmares for years, Jack. I don’t remember if I ever told you that. The Giantkiller. They didn’t stop until I came down out of the mountains and started back up again the day I found out. Those were worse, because it was you. Because it was you and because I -”

Grey sat up and clutched at Jack’s hand. 

“So you have to promise me. Promise me, Jack, no more of this stupid violent stuff. I don’t have so many friends that I can afford to lose them. Not again.”

He sat like that for a long time, watching Jack sleep. As the hours passed, it seemed that his breathing grew easier and Grey’s eyelids grew heavier. Somewhere between midnight and dawn, he fell asleep.

He woke up in the early hours of the morning, after dawn but before the fish shop had officially opened for business, to Rupert with a tray that had two pieces of bread and a large bowl of soup on it. Sometime in the middle of the night, the hedgewitch had put a blanket on him. Grey sat up and found that his neck was stiff from sleeping bent over. 

Rupert passed him one of the pieces of bread and felt Jack’s forehead. It was still warm, but less so than it had been the night before. “I feel an urge to make a joke about being out of the Forest, but not out of the woods, but it won’t quite come together,” he said. 

Grey dipped his bread in the soup to soften it. He could smell the break baking upstairs, so this had to be yesterday’s still. 

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You have all the time in the world.”

**Author's Note:**

> I thrive on comments either here or on my tumblr @mizeliza


End file.
